Ideas, inspirations and trends for urban living.

Fixing main streets not just coals to Newcastle

Newcastle has repositioned itself around a revitalised main street.

Dan
Thompson from the Empty Shops Network is convinced that the high street is making a
comeback. “People are returning to the corner store” he recently told an
audience at a Renew Australia conference in Newcastle, a city where only four
years ago you could count the main street lunch crowd on one hand.

The broken main street, a ubiquitous
feature of the modern city, has been fifty years in the making and cannot be
easily remedied with investment alone. Hunter Street, once Newcastle’s premier shopping
destination, began haemorrhaging retail not long after the city’s tram network
was dismantled in 1950. Around this time, an increasingly car dependent city
began to rely more on their suburban malls and by the time that Newcastle’s
heavy industry began shutting down much of the inner-city building stock had
become rundown and obsolete.

This is a familiar story that has
played out across the Western world for decades, the effects and severity of
which remains contingent on a city’s geography and demographics. Detroit, the
cradle and coffin of the modern world, remains the downtown horror story.
Managing decline since the end of World War Two, over twenty percent of the Motor City’s CBD remained vacant last year.
Other cities like Pittsburgh, however, have lured back linchpin tenants using
public subsidies with varying degrees of success.

But
the Newcastle story is different to most. Unlike other Western cities, Newcastle’s
central business district has found itself on the eastern fringe of its own metropolitan
area. Established at the mouth of the Hunter River in 1804, Newcastle is the
nation’s second-oldest city but it did not begin growing inland until after
heavy industry came to town in 1915. Since then, the metro area has swallowed a
clutch of old mining towns that are now low to medium-density suburbs. For this
reason, the original business district now appears marooned on a peninsula and
is characterised by a surplus of unrenovated building stock that doesn’t meet
the needs of modern businesses.

The
1989 Newcastle earthquake, the deadliest and most expensive in Australian history, was
more or less the death knell for Hunter Street shopping. From that
year onwards, the lights were going out in the inner-city quicker than ever
before and by 2011 the last of the big department stores went out of business.
But around this time, even with no major commercial tenants left in the city
centre, the unexpected was starting to happen: people were coming back to
Newcastle’s main street.

Attracted
to projects and events supported by Renew Newcastle, a not-for-profit community
renewal organisation founded by Marcus Westbury in 2008, Newcastle’s creative
class began generating demand for ancillary businesses in the city’s historical
centre. One Penny Black, an espresso bar underneath an early Renew project, single-handedly
brought single-origin coffee and coiffed baristas to town. Spilling out into
the empty mall on milk crates and old chairs, Newcastle’s Bright Young Things established
a connection between the activation projects and small business. The bandwagon
effect soon kicked in and the return of the lunch-time crowd brought new
opportunities to the broken main drag.

As
more small businesses followed the harbinger’s lead, the remaining chain stores
found that the main street’s traditional market no longer existed. Gloria Jean’s
cited “difficult trading conditions” when they closed their doors a few months
ago, but in reality their brand had no place in a precinct of independent
coffee shops and niche retail.

As
the new and mostly under-thirty market began curating the business mix on
Hunter Street East, Newcastle could begin promoting their old city centre as
the region’s place for destination retail and personalised experiences.
Recognising the new social infrastructure, an increasing number of
restaurateurs even began picking the old business district over the revitalized
waterfront at Honeysuckle. The Sydney
Morning HeraldGood Food Guide gives
some indication that this new generation of restaurants complement the
integrity and originality of their neighbours; four of the Hunter region’s eight
toqued restaurants, believe it or not, are now within a block of Hunter Street.

Today’s
Hunter Street East, a bustling strip of niche clothing labels and espresso
bars, has little in common with the tumbleweed drag of last decade. The
McDonald’s is gone. The David Jones is gone. The Angus & Robertson is gone.
But in their place are businesses like Nook Store, Make Space, Shannon Hartigan
Images and The Emporium – home-grown retail experiences that trumped the franchises in their ability to pull a crowd. Lonely Planet even placed Newcastle among its top ten cities to visit in 2011, giving gravitas to the claim that it is emerging as Australia's new arts capital.

Although
opportunities to revive Hunter Street are far from being exhausted, a lot has
been achieved without top-down planning and investment. Several years ago,
Newcastle City Council set aside over $3 million to revitalise the ailing main
street. While debate and inertia prevented the rollout of any council-funded
program, the creative class were attracting a new generation of small business
owners to town that have since done more for the city than anyone could have
anticipated.

Hunter
Street, once again Newcastle’s premier destination for quality experiences, is
a world-class example of how micro-work allows communities to reclaim their
public spaces. At the same conference that Dan Thompson declared the return of
the high street, Coralie Winn from Gap Filler in Christchurch said “the most
important thing is to convince people that something is happening”. Once you’ve
achieved that, as Renew Newcastle did even as traditional retail was bottoming
out, the street will begin to come back organically and better than before.